Recently I've been having like intermittent breakdowns over words. 

Like, one minute I'm reading English normally as if the language isn't broken at all, and then I'll suddenly stumble upon a word that I've never seen before in my life like "shoe" except that I have seen it my entire life, which is just worse, because I genuinely forget how to pronounce it.

I spent a good ten minutes staring at the word "shoe" wheezing "what? what is this word?? it makes no sense? how is this pronounced??? Shouldn't it be 'show'? What word is this?!"

To this day i can't understand why shoe is pronounced "shew" not "show".

It happened again just a while ago when I was reading a review book and I saw the word "soldier". I said "saul-dee-ear". And then I was like "sauldeeear? What word is this??? I've never seen this word before? Is it French??"

I kinda had a breakdown over that too, until I went to google and finally remembered that the word was actually soldier, as in a person who fights in an army, not some strange french word or a deer.

I shared this whole crisis with my mom once, and she told me a story about how when I was a toddler, and a few years after she had given birth, she didn't know how to spell the word "who". 

This went on for a good week, she told me, and she was too scared to ask anyone how to spell it. She couldn't look it up in the dictionary either because she genuinely couldn't remember what letter it started with. It was just a strange word that she knew, and the spelling was on the tip of her tongue, but she literally could not. This was the biggest mood.

I can only blame one thing for this strange phenomenon, and that's the English language. 

I mean, because we're native speakers we sort of get used to its downright illogical nature, and I can't help but feel relief that English is my first language. Imagine learning English when you're a native Mandarin speaker? Or Arabic? Two completely different worlds. The characters systems are completely different. At least in most of Europe you're still using the same letters. 

Well yeah, that's the time I didn't know what the word "shoe" was or what it meant. Stuff like this usually happens when I'm reading or writing, and they'll never happen to big and complex words. Only the smaller more common ones to make you want to cry even more. 

Like, you'd think French would have more complex and illogical pronunciation rules, but trust me. I do French in high school and even it follows a logical structure and pattern. Its way easier than English, WAY, and Spanish too, in my opinion.

A note to any foreign language speaker? In English, if you learn one thing, remember it, but just don't hold on to it too much, yeah? There's bound to be some exception to just make you question what you've known your entire life.

Like the word shoe.